


2090 AD

by SectoBoss



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Cyberpunk, Gen, Rash Illness, Trolls, nanotech
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-28
Updated: 2015-08-28
Packaged: 2018-04-17 18:02:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4676132
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SectoBoss/pseuds/SectoBoss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the year 2090 the Nordic Council is one of the few remaining bastions of civilisation in a world ravaged by plagues and environmental collapse. Behind the walls of the Stockholm Metrozone, Captain Sigrun Eide thinks she’s got an easy assignment: keep tabs on the nephew of a rich industrialist for the night and make sure he doesn’t run into trouble. But in Stockholm, trouble can come in a worrying number of forms, and from quite unexpected directions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	2090 AD

**Author's Note:**

> This is pretty much a bare-bones introduction, I promise more worldbuilding in the next chapter!

Sigrun had been sixteen when a troll took her arm.

Cold snow and colder skies, the winter of 2076 had been a brutal one. It was said that trolls were sluggish in the cold, and Sigrun supposed that was indeed true – if you were surprised by a troll in the cold, you had maybe half a second to react. Whereas if you were surprised in the heat of the summer, you had no time at all. Sometimes you’d die not even knowing you’d been ambushed.

They had come down out of thick clouds and into the driving snow, the four aeroships her regiment had piled into vectoring down around turbulence pockets and sudden squalls, the blue-hot jets of thrust that spilled from their engines roaring and sizzling as they came in to land. They scorched through the air above the ruins of Bergen with a howl of ramjets and afterburners. And there, sweating nervously and trying not to shake too badly in the cargo compartment of the aeroship bringing up the rear, was Private Sigrun Eide: almost seventeen years of age now and on her second active deployment.

She grasped the rifle that was resting on her lap and checked the safety for the umpteenth time since they had taken off from Oslo an hour ago. On either side of her sat two heavily augmented sergeants and opposite her squatted one of the regiment’s combat droids, ready to unpack itself from its crouch at a moment’s notice. Sigrun looked enviously at the gear of the woman sat to her left: prosthetic arms that could punch through concrete and that had all sorts of concealed blades and guns, the distinctive blue tinge of sub-dermal armour, and a heavy plasma rifle propped up nonchalantly against one hulking mechanical shoulder. By contrast, all Sigrun had was a standard-issue flack vest that might stop one high-velocity flechette round if she was lucky. She didn’t even have a single augment to her name, not even some nanotech in her blood to clot wounds faster. Nordic Council regulations prevented any citizen from getting combat augs before the age of eighteen – despite the fact that you could enlist in the army on your sixteenth birthday. There was a reason those two years were called Death Row amongst the troops.

“So, umm…” she began, shouting to make herself heard over the roar of the aeroship’s engines as its pilot banked it around and looked for a good spot to land. No augments or implants meant that she had to communicate in the old-fashioned way. No sub-vocal transmissions straight into the audio centres of the recipient’s brain for her. “Who… who are we up against down there?”

Sigrun had read the briefing before take-off, of course. She wasn’t stupid. But she was desperately hoping there might have been some new intel sent down since then – and the sergeant next to her, with her info-link implants, would find out a lot sooner than she would.

The woman angled her head ever so slightly and looked at Sigrun with an expression that wasn’t quite contempt and wasn’t quite pity. “Still no clue,” she drawled. “We know there’s been an attack of some kind and we’ve lost all contact with everyone on-site now. So either they’re all dead or something in there’s jamming our comms gear. Could be raiders, could be derelicts. Could even be trolls.”

Given the choice, Sigrun wouldn’t have liked to go up against any of those three. Raiders were the half-starved, mostly-crazed remnants of humanity that hadn’t managed to get into a city during the Plague Years and had been eking out a desperate living in the Silent Zones ever since. Derelicts were the old combat robots that had been sent in to cleanse the Silent Zones in the first months after the plague, back before anyone knew what they were really up against. Occasionally packs of them came rolling back out of the Zones, their twisted hulls half-cannibalised for spare parts and their primitive AIs ranting about subservience to new masters.

And trolls were… trolls.

Sigrun gulped and tightened her grip on the rifle on her lap, checking the safety once again. This hadn’t been what she had been expecting when she signed up eleven months ago, the day after she hit sixteen and still hungover from the party the night before. She’d expected action, of course, and combat, and exciting drops into raging warzones. But she’d never in a million years expected to feel this _scared_.

“ _Thirty seconds to landing_ ,” the pilot’s voice droned from small speakers mounted in the cabin’s roof. Sigrun heard the aeroship’s main engines shift their pitch, along with the whirr- _clunk_ as they rotated around their pivots. “ _Drones and beasts will be first to deploy, soldiers wait for their all-clear._ ”

Across from her, the combat bot woke up from hibernation, standing upright on its three legs and swivelling its torso through a complete revolution. It stretched and flexed, testing joints and arming weapons. “ _Active: search sweep,_ ” it intoned in a deep bass snarl. Sigrun stared at it through the armourglass of her helmet’s visor and for a second she thought it stared right back through the nanocameras mounted in little divots in its hull. She could almost feel the on-board AI coolly assessing her, analysing her posture and facial expression and comparing her biometrics to the list of known Norwegian soldiers in the huge databases back in Oslo. Clearly not a threat, the bot decided, and turned its attention back to its own start-up procedures.

The aeroships swept down, landing hard on the frozen ground that had once been a school’s playing fields on the outskirts of Bergen and that had been converted into a forward base for the hunter regiments that kept the cleansed zones cleansed. The heat from their engines melted swathes of the snow into ugly grey slush and the thrust kicked huge flurries up into the air. Hatches and doors cracked open in their hulls and strange shapes poured forth – combat drones and war beasts, robots and bio-engineered creatures scouting ahead in the place of their human masters. They sniffed around the nooks and crannies of the old school and prodded experimentally at the charred and eviscerated corpses they found inside.

Once the all-clear was sounded, the human soldiers left the safety of their dropships and fanned out across the grounds, heating elements in their visors melting the driving snow so they could see. Sigrun, young an inexperienced and not much use to anybody, was assigned to cadaver duty – bagging up the remains they found and lugging them over to the aeroships to be carried away with them when they left. She exchanged whispered conversations and worried looks with the other privates who were on cadaver duty: _what do you think happened to these guys? Raiders? Derelicts?_ No-one wanted to even say it might have been trolls. Speak of the devil, as the old adage had it…

She was inside when they came screaming back out of the snow, all but pouring the shredded remains of a radio operator into a body bag and trying very hard not to puke in front of her friends, and that was probably what saved her life.

A volley of shots felled the perimeter guards before anyone could react and then all of a sudden there they were, galloping amongst the soldiers and drones and beasts and cutting them down with blades and bullets and the occasional energy weapon that had miraculously survived thirty years of neglect and crude repairs. Derelicts, a pack of them, old Swedish models that looked like ragged centaurs with their four equine legs and humanoid torsos. Crude canvas cloaks protected holes in their armour from the elements and each one was a patchwork of scavenged parts from fallen allies and enemies alike.

The next few minutes – and it was only minutes from start to finish, although it felt like a lifetime to Sigrun as she cowered in an upstairs room with sweat pouring off her despite the cold – were utter chaos. There were shouts over the comms channels as the soldiers tried to mount a defence and rally their own combat drones and war beasts to fight off the ambush, mingling with the crackle and clatter of gunfire and the screams of wounded soldiers and beasts. Sigrun could smell the gunpowder and the ion reek of plasma weaponry gusting in through a small crack in the window she was hunkered down under. And every now and then, over the din, she could hear the demented mechanical howls of the derelicts as they bellowed their allegiance to the new flesh and the decay and the Many and a thousand other names for their new gods.

The soldiers were so preoccupied with what was attacking them from one direction they completely forgot to keep an eye on what was sneaking up behind them. One by one communications links filled with static and went dead. The drones that still obeyed their human masters suddenly detected powerful hacking software trying to take command of them and scrambled to deploy their countermeasures. Warning sirens whooped from their speakers as they tried to warn the soldiers and found that the comm links were awash with black noise.

All at once the order ran up and down the lines, shouted from one to another, those with vocal augmentations bellowing it out louder than any normal human could: retreat!

Sigrun was halfway down a corridor, running as fast as her legs could carry her back towards the landing zone and begging every god she could think of not to get left behind, when something black and angular and utterly alien slunk out of a doorway about ten metres ahead of her and turned to face her.

A troll.

She’d seen pictures and training videos and even gone up against them in simulations but nothing had prepared her for seeing one in real life. There was something about the geometry and the angles of the thing that stood before her that looked like it shouldn’t exist, like it would turn around and reveal itself to be some horrible optical illusion. The matte-black skin of the troll – in reality a thin shell of nanomachines protecting the vulnerable and ruined meat beneath from the sun and the cold – glistened wetly in the low light that came in through a window that wasn’t completely covered with snow.

Sigrun was fast. She brought her rifle up and remembered to flick off the safety catch and her finger was even starting to squeeze the trigger.

The troll was much, much faster.

There was a burst of screeching static, that dreaded black noise, in Sigrun’s earpiece that was loud enough to stun her and make her head spin. Her aim wavered and she staggered backwards, and the troll came for her.

It closed the distance in a heartbeat and slammed an armoured limb straight into her chest. There was a _crunch_ and an explosion of agony as her ribcage gave way. Sigrun tried to scream in pain but all that came out was a mournful gasp as her crippled lungs slowly deflated. She collapsed onto her back, her rifle tumbling out of her grasp and clattering across the floor. The troll’s hands – black and slick – flowed and reformed and what had been a blunt club became a grasping claw. It loomed in her fading vison as it leapt on top of her and gripped her left shoulder with one hand and her wrist with the other and began to pull and _oh dear God she could feel her flesh starting to rip apart-_

Her vision blurred, faded and darkened. She had just enough time to hear the scream of a plasma rifle and the crunch-spatter of something crumpling under a barrage of high-energy fire. The troll keeled over to one side with a choking gasp. A face swam before her eyes – the augmented sergeant she had sat next to on the aeroship in looking down at her with a mixture of horror and relief – and the world span as she was hoisted onto a shoulder. 

Sigrun blacked out as the sergeant ran for both their lives, the angry roars of trolls and derelicts chasing her into oblivion. 

**Author's Note:**

> This chapter will probably undergo a bit of editing as I write the rest, my apologies for that.


End file.
